


suitcase of memories

by Missy



Category: Laverne & Shirley (TV)
Genre: (As Your Life Would Be Should You Have Had Sex Before An Alien), Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/M, Fireworks, Fluff and Angst, Fourth of July, Getting Together, Mildly Unsettling, Missing Years, Post-Time Skip, Romance, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:55:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24268540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: If You're Lost/You Can Look/And You Will Find Me/Time After Time.If You Fall/I Will Catch YouI Will Be WaitingTime After Time- Cyndi Lauper, Time After Time.A Sequel to amythis'What Have You Got to Lose?
Relationships: Laverne DeFazio/Lenny Kosnowski, Shirley Feeney/Andrew "Squiggy" Squiggman
Comments: 26
Kudos: 4





	1. The Secondhand Unwinds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amythis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amythis/gifts).



They didn’t talk about it at first. What could they possibly say to one another? “Thanks for the great sex, sorry I sort of made you miss out on the last three years of your life?” 

But the longing had always been there – at least on Lenny’s half of the scale – and the emotional intimacy had always been there – at least on Laverne’s half of the scale. So her hand drifted across his thigh when they sat upon her couch, and his headlocky bearhugs lasted a little longer than usual. 

Time passed. She got a job with a department store. She fell in love with a stuntman who left her for an actress. Her best friend fell in love with her doctor ideal and got pregnant and married, before she had time to process any of what was happening. 

The boys opened a talent agency. Lenny fell in love, too – with a college student who he’d thought of marrying, he told her much later (five kids later, as if he were afraid that that would somehow blacken the good name of their marriage). After Shirley left, Lenny decided to try his own luck on the road as a musician. His hair got longer, and his wardrobe impossibly more colorful. She was in aerospace, testing boots and flight suits; was angling herself toward becoming an aerospace engineer (and doing the most frightening thing possible – going back to school to be certified). She watched his freedom with longing, unaware that he watched her growth with envy.

Laverne was happy that Mork hadn’t mind-wiped them, but sometimes she wished he had. 

***

Everything exploded on the Fourth of July, but she might have known it would. His last band had fallen apart, and he’d come back home tired and quieter than he’d ever been. Somehow he was the same man he’d always been – a little oblivious, a little flawed, a little too soft for the world, with his shaggy long blond hair falling into his eyes and the hem of his paisley caftan trailing in the breeze behind them. Walking beside Laverne under the star shower of fireworks he reached tentatively out for her hand. Then she impulsively pulled him into a kiss, and everything – logic, reason, self-preservation – melted into a puddle at her feet. 

Overhead, cordite and gunpowder sizzled, and red and green and blue rained down on their heads. They pulled apart. “You ain’t kissed me like that since twelve years from now,” he said, a little confused, a little amused. 

“Come home with me,” she said. It was half a demand. But he’d always listened to her demands, hadn’t he?

The sex was as good as she remembered it being. He was on top this time, and he turned her into the same babbling mess this way, and he became the same affectionate, pleading one he’d been (or would be). Part of it was need and part of it was desperation – and part of it was because it had been months since anyone had touched her, years, really, since Lenny had (or would).

It was a little past four when she surfaced from the fog, sitting up on his face, holding his wilting cock in her hand as she shook through the last of the latest orgasm he’d given her. She slid to the side, sat up on the bed, her left breast peeping out from beneath the covers. Lenny gave her one of his fixed stares, the kind that made him look a little like a serial killer, and she papped him gently against his left cheekbone until his focus changed. 

“What?” he asked. His face was still shiny from her pussy, and he licked his lips, like he wanted to savor her.

“What are we doing?” she asked. “I mean…I don’t know if I…if we…” But she also knew. Knew there wasn’t anyone like him out there – no one she was this comfortable with, no one who looked at her like she was a princess. And she couldn’t lie to herself about being attracted to him anymore.

“Are we moving too fast?” he asked her.

“God, no.” She’d known him since she was five and they’d been doing this dance of attraction and repulsion ever since, getting to know each other very well along the way.

“What, Laverne?” he asked, his voice going a little hysterical. “What?”

“I love you and it’s scary.” And, she realized, part of it was because she wondered what the time travel had done to them. Maybe Mork had…but no. She looked at Lenny and remembered feeling this way before, like her heart was trying to beat is way out of her chest, only before she’d forced herself to ignore it, making herself look beyond who Lenny was to her and to the way he behaved.

“Oh. Really?” he asked. His eyes were bright and filled with surprise. 

“Yeah,” she said. 

“I…I don’t want you to be here if you don’t want to be here,” Lenny said, which was weirdly cosmic. Words had never been his strong suit unless they were bundled up in lyrical stanzas. “I just know…when I’m out there on the road, I miss you.”

Something in her softened at that confession. She did miss him too – when he was gone, when only Squig came slamming through the door. With him gone she had no one to confide in, no one to pour her worries and excitement and frustration out on. No one to comfort, to bandage, to hold, either. 

“It’s bad when you ain’t here too,” Laverne confessed. 

“So,” Lenny said, “I guess that means we shouldn’t go nowhere at all,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I guess that means we ought to stick together.”

She moved into the comfort of his arms, and he lay beside her, holding tight, until she was lulled off into a comfortable sleep as the first rays of morning sunshine pierced her shutters. 

Neither of them knew that when California cooled – slightly – and fall had just begun, he’d get her pregnant. Neither of them knew about the months of fighting and begging that lay ahead. They didn’t know that there would be two of them, superficially identical – twice the work, twice the worry, twice the happiness. 

She wouldn’t marry him until the next year – a few weeks after delivery, and between feedings. 

On the Fourth of July, because no matter where they were in the universe, that was a day that belonged to them.


	2. Watching Through Windows

“Christopher Robin goes hippety-hoppity through the woods…” There was a dramatic pause as Lenny shuffled the page. “I don’t know what that means. Why would he hippety-hop when he could just walk in a non-fruity way?”

“Daddy, you’re silly,” came one treble voice, followed by the giggles of another.

Laverne stirred under the covers, half-awake. It was seven in the morning, she realized, checking the clock- which means the girls were up for the day. Laverne had gone out like a light last night, she realized – which meant she’d skipped reading the girls’ bedtime story to them. _Poor Len,_ she thought to herself, biting back a smirk. They must’ve woken up and demanded retribution. They were probably sitting in the rocking chair Edna had given them as a shower gift, where she and Lenny had rocked and fed them as babies, and which was nearly too small to hold all of them safely. 

“Daddy,” Melody’s voice was a high treble, “you skipped that part.”

“I did not,” Lenny whined. The two five-year-olds on his lap began to simultaneously complain, reciting the story back flawlessly, and he said, “Don’t do that! It’s scary.”

“Sorry, daddy,” they said simultaneously. Laverne hid her smirk in her pillow. Those were her girls.

Lenny went back to the beginning and finished the story. “Okay,” he said. “You go get dressed and I’ll make pancakes after I get your mom up. Don’t turn the TV on ‘til I get down there.”

Both girls hooted, but Melody apparently hadn’t followed her sister out of the room. “Daddy, can you brush my hair?”

“Aww, sure. You don’t want to wait ‘til mommy gets up?”

“No, I like the way YOU do it,” she said. Laverne bit back another laugh. Melody was a daddy’s girl – Mindy took after Laverne, acted just like her. Melody liked horses and rainbows and ballet; Mindy was an ace shortstop in her Little League team. But they were also aliens to their parents – complete unknowns. 

And though Lenny would never say it, Melody was Lenny’s favorite, with his loud laugh and his shyness and his sensitivity packed into a single tiny body. Half asleep, Laverne listened to Lenny fetch a brush. Laverne knew without opening her eyes that Lenny was now brushing Melody’s hair out with his usual patient, single-minded focus. They sat together on the far edge of the bed while they chatted about nonsense.

For all of his fears about becoming a parent, Lenny was a pretty fantastic father, especially for his girls. Hilariously, in spite of his utter certainty that Laverne was ‘meant’ to be a mother Laverne had been the one with doubts during her frustrating and love-complicated pregnancy. She was gruff with them, blustery like her own Pop had been, but loving, she hoped. 

“Daddy,” said Melody, “when did you meet mommy?”

“We was your age,” Lenny said. “She came to Milwaukee from Brooklyn. I’d just moved there a couple of years before from New Jersey. I saw her the first time when she moved into her building.” Lenny’s family had lived a few blocks away, but his father always sent him to play in Laverne’s slightly safer neighborhood. “And I just kinda knew I wanted to be around her.”

“How romantic!” Melody sighed. Laverne didn’t giggle at her child’s reaction to the story – along with horses and princesses, Melody loved a love story.

“Pf, romantic! She punched me right in the nose the first time I tried to kiss her!”

“Yeah, but you deserved it! You asked to check my braces with your tongue!” Laverne blurted out.

“I was thirteen, Laverne! I wasn’t exactly the sophisticated he-man I am now.” She belly-laughed and he frowned at her. “Ahh. My beloved’s awake,” Lenny said. Melody giggled and – from the doorway – Mindy gagged. Laverne peered over at her and saw she was already in her baseball uniform.

“Stop making fun. You go downstairs and get ready for breakfast like your dad told you. What time’s your game?” Laverne asked. 

“One,” Mindy reminded her, rolling her eyes. 

“Listen to your mother,” he said, gently nudging Melody off his lap. “You’re all done, too.”

“Can we watch cartoons?” Melody asked.

“After breakfast, like your father told you,” Laverne said, the repetition of life as a parent once again grating her nerves. 

The girls continued to mock them as they headed downstairs, and Laverne snorted. She finally looked at her husband for the first time that day. Lenny was in his jeans and teeshirt – his shaggy hair recently brushed. He crawled to her and they kissed until Lenny rested his palm against her belly with a low, grumbling sigh. 

“I’m still sorry about that,” He said.

She snorted. “For your sperm having a sense of direction or the condom breaking?” 

Laverne’s own voice echoed up through the years at her, her old past fears. _I’ll be fat, and no one will date me._ Well, she had no questions about how much Lenny liked being with her, fat or not – but he thought she was pretty when she was sick, and when she was tired and sweaty, her hair up in a ponytail. All the time and endlessly.

“Laverne,” he whined against her mouth. 

“Don’t whine. Get up and get the girls breakfast and I’ll be there in a minute.”

Lenny sighed and curled his arm around her hip. He could just about get it around her belly. The babies rolled over under his grip. “I wasn’t whining,” he said, but got up.

She thought about the girls as she dressed. Their blondness, their synchronicity – and she wondered, sometimes, if what had happened between herself and their father at Mork’s place had increased her fertility. Or specifically her fertility with Lenny, and only him – she had not produced twins after that horrible incident on the aircraft carrier, for instance. Lenny told her that twins were prevalent on his side of the family, and she’d met a couple of sets at the last family reunion, and thus she was apt to believe him and shut her worries away. But this was the last set, she promised herself, feeling one of the kids knock her in the kidney and the other hammer an elbow into her lungs.

Laverne waddled to the door and pasted on a smile. Her feet and back were killing her, but the people she loved the most in the world were out there and needed her.

Hemorrhoids or not.


	3. Confusion Is Nothing New

“Oh Laverne, it’s finally happening. Can you believe it?”

“I need to pee,” Laverne said.

“Again?” sighed Shirley. Laverne rolled her eyes and waddled toward the stall behind them, the only one in the small bridal suite where Laverne had carefully helped her best friend primp for her upcoming wedding ceremony. 

To Andrew Squiggman. Sometimes miracles _did_ happen.

“I can’t help it, Shirl! The baby’s on my bladder again.” She sighed in relief as she managed to haul up her matron of honor dress without wrinkling it too severely. Everything was in bright, fire-engine red – the trendy color of the hour, according to Shirl and the forty million bridal magazines she, Shirl and her daughters had poured over during the months of planning that led to the ceremony.

“Well, try to move it up. I can’t have my matron of honor leaving in the middle of the ceremony to…relieve herself.” Shirley sighed and fixed her hair. “This is why I stopped at one child. I still don’t know why you and Lenny didn’t stop a three…cubs…like you planned.”

“Hey, it ain’t my fault we got two sets of twins,” Laverne said. She didn’t want to explain to Shirley that five kids in fifteen years wasn’t entirely unheard of, and that sometimes condoms break. This latest child was planned, at least, unlike the boys had been. “Besides, you know Squig wants to have a kid.”

“Yes, but two is easier than five!”

“Shirl, I’m fine, all right?” Laverne said. She finished freshening up, flushed, and re-arranged her clothing. “Me and Len can make it on his salary, and I’ve got money coming in from the sale of Cowboy Bills.” Her Pop, smart cookie he was, had bought stock in Cowboy Bills, and he’d sold it when he cashed out of his franchise Laverne had gotten a quarter of the money. It evened out in the end to be enough to set aside for college funds for the girls and to skink into repair work and updates for the house.

That meant fending off her daughter’s whining when they said they totally needed the next Shaun Cassidy album, and ignoring the boys’ need for new sneakers – which would be generic and from a department store instead of some sort of designer brand. Laverne wondered for the millionth time why she and Lenny didn’t move somewhere cheaper, like Cleveland or back to Milwaukee – where the living standard was lower and they could wring more money out of Lenny’s salary. But the kids were California babies, and she didn’t want to rip them out of the schools they had been going to for years. Besides, Laverne loved her house. There were too many memories there. 

As she washed her hands, Laverne glanced over at Shirley. Her best friend had finally got a real satin-and-roses wedding – more than she’d gotten from her marriage to Walter, ended so cruelly by the liberation of Saigon. She was wearing a white lace gown that they’d gotten at a discount thanks to a friend of a friend of Shirley’s, and she wore a cream-colored veil. 

The white was slightly off-white, but white it was.

“Look at you, huh!” Laverne said, shaking out her wet hands before wrapping her arms around Shirley. “You two are finally doing it! And you’re gonna have a real good wedding – thanks to me and Len shoving your stubborn heads together.”

“Well, yes – lace and satin were a better gesture toward tradition than Andrew’s suggestion.” Shirley shook her head. “I love that man, but I’m not going to marry him in a tiger-striped teddy and stockings.”

Laverne winced and patted Shirley’s back again. “I think he wanted to impress his mother.”

Shirley’s lip curled, as it always did, at the mention of the tiny, fiery, and abusive Mrs. Squiggman the senior. “God, I hope not.”

The wedding march began to play, and Laverne straightened Shirley’s veil out. Someone knocked at the door. “Come in, Wally.”

“It ain’t Wally!” said Frank DeFazio. “It’s me, giving the bride away!”

“Which was supposed to be Wally’s job!” Laverne said, pulling the door open. “Pop, what happened to the kid?”

“Do you think I know? He’s busy being a kid! Said he wanted to stand up for his mom instead of walking her. So we switched parts!” Frank smiled and stopped yelling, offering his arm to Shirley. “You look great,” he blandished.

“Thank you, Mr. DeFazio,” said Shirley. She’d deal with her son – whose relationship with Squiggy had always been wary and odd on both ends of the spectrum – after the wedding. 

Laverne found her husband – the best man – in his bright plaid suit with suspiciously misty eyes. “Hey,” he said, and kissed the top of his wife’s hairsprayed head. “This remind you of anything?”

“Yeah. At least I wasn’t pregnant then.”

“Yeah, but it was close,” Lenny pointed out. He stroked her waist and hips gently, his eyes far away. They moved up the aisle side-by-side, their bodies knowing the rhythm of the motion, their feet in happy concert with one another, as always.

They separated at the head of the aisle, and Laverne stood to the right of Shirley at the altar. Squiggy had worn a fire-engine red tuxedo with mustard-yellow sleeve details and a bright blue handkerchief. He was attracting more attention than the bride, but Laverne knew he would and Shirley – after the spectacle of her first, more Mummyish, husband, likely had expected it as well.

The bride and groom watched one another with love in their eyes. It had taken them centuries to get to this point, but right now they were united.

*** 

Laverne had eyes at the back of her head by now, and an instinct for when her kids were up to no good. At the moment, the coast seemed clear. The girls were mainly well-behaved at this point; Melody sighing over how pretty Aunt Shirley looked, Mindy trying to manipulate her Uncle Carmine out of Yankees tickets for their upcoming visit to New York. The boys were running around on the dance floor, using Anne Marie and Hector as maypoles while the expended their energy by zig-zagging around.

Laverne eyeballed both boys with a smirk. “I still don’t believe you didn’t remind me about him when we named the kids,” Laverne said. She learned Lenny’s long arms and let her gently sweep her around the room, the baby between them jutting out an elbow and a knee every once in awhile in protest.

“Ow!” Lenny remarked, as the baby kicked at him. “Hey, we get free car rentals every time in Milwaukee. It kinda panned out,” he said.

Laverne snorted. “Sure.” She caught sight of Shirley and Squiggy awkwardly dancing across the floor together. “They look good together, right?”

“Yeah,” Lenny said. He paused. “Hey. Do you ever wonder if what happened with Mork pushed ‘em together?”

Lenny never brought up the Mork thing in public; when you know a friendly, sexually curious alien personally, you do not speak aloud about him, lest you endanger his life. “I dunno. I wonder if it was always supposed to be him and her, and you and me, y’know?”

“Like destiny?”

“Yeah,” he said. Over Lenny’s shoulder, Shirley and Squiggy were already fighting again.

In this world and many others, some things never changed.


	4. The Drum Beats Out of Time

They’re in Boston to check Mindy in to her dorm at Berklee when they stop by the Kennedy Museum. Not quite old enough for the senior discount, Laverne thinks they make a pretty fairly cute picture – Lenny with his thinning hair and baggy jeans, Laverne with ten pounds on she can’t shed, her Bucs jersey and her red-dyed hair. They hold hands as they move through the museum – staring into replicas of Kennedy’s oval office, into fake storefronts, at correspondence from Jacqueline Kennedy and outfits pressed in plastic cases.

But they stop still in the long black hallway separating the main body of the museum’s exhibition halls from the large meeting foyer. Here several lines of television sets loop the black and white footage of Kennedy in the back of that car. Jackie in her pink suit. Little John-John saluting the casket and passing funeral train. 

They are frozen for a moment, staring up at the footage playing over and over again before their wide and dazzled eyes. It’s a reaction that many people from their generation might have when confronted by a world-shaking event from the past, but Laverne and Lenny watch it with fixed intensity because they don’t remember the assassination at all. 

There’s so much they missed out in when they skipped those years of their lives. The “I Have a Dream” speech. The birth of Beatlemania. The deaths of Patsy Cline and Ernie Davis. The infancy of Vietnam. Everything, it seemed, everything in the world had happened while they’d been in stasis.

The haunting fact is simple. They should remember this, but they don’t. 

Lenny’s hand reaches for hers and squeezes down. The tip of his thumb brushes the back of Laverne’s knuckles. He doesn’t have to say anything to her. The connective tissues of their experience had been a fun lark when they were twenty, and sometimes – past forty, five kids on, all of them at different stages of growing up, with Lenny edging up on a retirement he can’t afford to take and Laverne circling jobs in the help wanted ads –it was frightening to remember how far they’d gone, what they knew about the world around them, how hard they’d had to dance through the shared experience of their blast to the future. 

Laverne wonders about Mork sometimes, though more rarely now. Wars have been fought and buildings have fallen since the last time they saw him. Are he and Mindy okay? Do they have a family of their own? Has Mork returned to Ork in disgrace or is he a hero, a scholar? Did their vodeoing in front of him help or hurt humanity in the long run? Or was it just a smutty little side show?

The questions disappear when Lenny looks down at her. Those are the same clear blue eyes that held her gaze when she was a six year old. They’re the ones she has decided to spend the rest of her life looking into. They know what she’s seen, and understand why she’s so quiet now, watching without a word.

Laverne doesn’t say anything either. Her fingers close around his long, ivory fingers and hold on. They are indivisible, and that’s the part of the deal she’ll never take back.

She squeezes him in return.


End file.
